


An Echo

by Kerillian



Series: A Zora's Perseverence [5]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Dissociation, Flashbacks, Gen, Hylian Prince Sidon, Male Sheik (Legend of Zelda), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue, Selectively Mute Link (Legend of Zelda), Sexual Violence, Shape Shifting Sidon, Trans Sheik (Legend of Zelda), Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24835510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kerillian/pseuds/Kerillian
Summary: Link's doing what he's learnt to do best, which is looking for creeps to inflict grievous harm upon in the night.He fucks with the wrong creep.
Relationships: Link & Prince Sidon, Link/Prince Sidon
Series: A Zora's Perseverence [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763404
Kudos: 24





	An Echo

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. Please mind those tags!

There are times where Link has the strength to lie quietly when the muck starts building inside him, threatening to spill over. He stares at the ceiling while liquid pain and corruption eat him from the toes up, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness tying strings to his arms and legs, pulling him, but he can resist. Sometimes it yanks him right out, and it always did in the beginning. He was at its mercy with nobody to stop it. Now he can plant his feet and safely avoid being swept up until it passes, but sometimes he is weak.

Ganon was power. He was courage, courageous even as a young child at the mercy of a creature that would ruin him, but that only meant it gave Ganon more time to make him suffer before he buried that courage somewhere Link would struggle to find it. In burying it so deep, Ganon gave him a taste of his power. He crushed his hope so thoroughly that what little power he gave Link replaced it in the process.

That’s what kept him out on the streets. It was such a meager trade-off, but it worked. Each night he is too weak to resist the pull, Link blindly reaches out for some power again. He reaches for Ganon’s hand without even realising it, entrenched with the belief that harnessing his power will wipe out his fear, blind to the reality that it was Ganon who planted the fear in him to begin with.

So he prowls again. Tonight, he is weak. Ganon wants blood, and Link wants somebody other than him to be the one giving it.

There’s somebody he’s been tracking who seems willing to give him what he wants. Of course, they want two different things - Link sends him another picture. 

It was just this stranger’s luck it had to be Link he thought he was preying on.

He dresses, letting the strings pull his hands as he slides into something comfortable, something that looks easy to tear off.

The night gives him cover as he leaves. No Sidon to watch him - a product of trust he felt nothing for having broken tonight. He’s not present enough to let the complicated things he feels about Sidon hold him back. Ganon’s power helps him wipe Sidon’s face from his mind like magic.

Nothing will hold him back. It feels as right as anything has ever felt to him.

Link runs his hands across the brick walls of the alleyways he traverses to get where he needs to be. All that’s left of his path is a soft green glow, disappearing as it wipes his tracks clean. It’ll follow him all the way home, too, wiping the blood off the soles of his shoes, and the public will never know it was him.

He’s here, waiting in the darkness. 

Sometimes it’s a little difficult to stay soft. He can’t wait to get touched and manhandled and violated so the muck can surge forward. It works in his favour, because a predator can’t resist when it sees him looking hot and ready.

There’s a dark figure turning the corner, and Link steps gracefully into dim light, primed up to be the perfect bait.

“Hey,” Link coos, soft and caring, so far from the fear he lives under that he talks freely. 

“Hotel?” The man murmurs, still not quite visible, but enough for Link to know exactly what he’s going to do.

“No,” Link tells him. “No, here.”

The man chuckles. “Naughty.”

Link is nodding, smiling all the while until a hand reaches out to grab him.

It glows with a muddy red aura, burnt and blackened like boiling tar.

Link looks up and sees two ringed blue eyes peering at him from a hood that seems to melt away the longer he stays trapped under them.

A phantom fiend.

His stomach sinks. His lungs feel as though they’ve collapsed, he’s shrinking in the creature’s grip.

“So, so naughty, aren’t you,” It whispers as it comes closer.

Link’s whole body is already limp like a ragdoll, backed up against the bricks. His mind crawls back to a dirty den, he’s back to being chained up, he’s numb and bleeding all over and so far past screaming for help.

The hands grabbing him burn as they yank him around, pressing him against the wall where he can’t escape the fiend’s rotting breath as it speaks it in his ear. It speaks with Ganon’s voice, it burns with Ganon’s power. 

“How is it that I could find you so easily after so much time?” Its voice rasps, a sound so horrifying it makes Link think he might never speak to anybody again.

“Could it be that you’ve come to wish you were back in my hands, little one?”

A hand reaches down and cups his dick through his pants, and Link keens in pure, distilled fear. He fights to get away from it, because it burns even though his clothes, but when he thrashes his hips away it only presses his body back against what feels like a wall of searing sludge. He’s locked up and shaking violently in an evil grip with nobody around to see them, nobody to help.

“Oh,” it groaned, “I missed you.”

Link feels a tongue run over the point of his ear, over a little chunk missing from it. He feels bile rise in his throat.

“What’s the problem?” It laughs, pressing and squeezing his vulnerable flesh hard enough to hurt even without the burning corruption roiling off its body.

“I hear you rarely ever use this. Would it be so bad if I just tore it off?”

Link screams and his voice cracks, he shakes his head wildly and wails like a terrified child.

“NN--Nuh--” He tries, garbling sounds together while he feels weight on his backside, pressed so heavily that it hurts his hips. He keeps shaking his head _‘no, no, please no’_ , dizzy from the violence of the motion for the lack of words leaving his mouth.

“If I let you keep it, what’ll happen to your sense of obedience? You’ll be lost.”

‘ _No, no, no no-- No--_ ’

“Yes,” it growls, “It's what you deserve.”

What little light there is in the alleyway begins to grow dim. Link knows instinctively that he will never escape this. He lets himself shut down little by little, engulfed by burning darkness that feeds on his life force.

A light shatters the veil over him. It’s blinding, the fiend shrieks behind him and howls as it backs down, shocking him back to consciousness with its terrible pitch. Warm, pale hands grasp him, the smell of fresh vegetation and crackling fire smoke washing the rot away.

He finds himself hoisted on a familiar man’s back, held tightly by his legs wrapped around his waist. His arms tighten around his neck next, as much as they can after the fiend’s presence drained so much of his energy.

“Sheik,” He whimpers, “Sheik--!”

He repeats the man’s name, meeting no response, but soothed just by the name leaving his mouth. He was back to save him from Ganon’s grasp, just as he had done years ago.

Lights whoosh past them and melt into a blur, he hangs onto consciousness just as he hangs onto Sheik as they run far from the fiend.

  


* * *

  


Sidon’s eyes snap open as he wakes from slumber. He looks at his hands and body - still Hylian. Only now has he truly gotten used to sleeping on a Hylian bed like this.

His attention turns to the light he sees shining under the crack of his door. He frowns, having a sense that it’s just Link breaking into his house again, but reaching for his taser just in case.

Sidon opens his door and immediately, sobbing and harsh whispers can be heard from the doorway. He tiptoes across the tiles, holding his taser up as he locates the light and the sounds at their source - his laundry.

When he turns the corner, he is met with two figures - one of them is Link, hellaciously distressed and mottled with red marks across his body. The second is someone he’s never seen before - a slender, taller hylian male with ashy blond hair, dressed head to toe in black and hidden behind a mask. He looks a little bit like Link in the eyes, but he’s older and more muscular.

What alarms him is that he appears to be stripping Link to his underwear in his laundry.

“Who the fuck are you? What are you doing to him?” Sidon exclaims, pointing his taser at the stranger’s body.

The mystery man looks back at him and rolls his eyes, sliding one of Sidon’s hylian shirts onto Link’s bare body. 

“Answer me!” He yells.

That gets his attention again. He looks at Sidon, ticked off, and raises the back of his fist into view.

The bottom left triangle of a Triforce gleams back at him, taking him aback.

Sidon drops his aim, gaping wordlessly. “Zel...da,” he murmurs, completely unsure, confused to high hell.

The man scoffs and looks back at him. “It’s Sheik,” he rasps, voice unmistakably masculine.

“Sheik...” Sidon repeats. He looks a little harder and spies some familiar twine around his neck. 

An amulet. 

It explains why the princess was able to give him such sound advice on shape-shifting.

Or, no, perhaps not... princess--?

“You can call me Princess Zelda when we’re in the castle, Rutela,” He says, laying comforting hands on Link’s stricken shoulders as he huffs and sobs, seated on the counter. “But elsewhere, it’s Sheik. Sheik is always me, and I am always he.”

He whispers and hushes when his attention moves back to Link, soothing him with a hug, which Link accepts by clinging with notable force.

“What happened to him?” Sidon asks, voice soft to match Sheik’s.

“Nothing good,” says Sheik. “It was a phantom of Ganon. He was vulnerable.”

Sidon’s stomach lurches. Memories of the scene of Mipha’s death flood back to him.

“How badly is he hurt?” Sidon asks quickly, stepping closer.

“Very.” Sheik replies, with a bite to his voice. 

“The fiend groped and burned him.” He gives Sidon a closer look, lifting the shirt on Link’s body, showing him a patch of reddened skin. “I haven’t looked, but it’s probably worse between his legs.”

“He’s not cut or bruised, but he is traumatised - and _retraumatised_.”

Sidon digests this, accompanied by the harrowing sound of Link sobbing into Sheik’s neck.

He pulls back after a little while, prompting Link to cry out in distress.

“I need to go,” Sheik says, half to Link and half to Sidon. “It’ll be looking for him. I can distract it and lead it out far enough if I wear his clothes.”

“Come and let him hold onto you,” Sheik says impatiently, pushing Link’s grasping hands away. 

Even as Sidon awkwardly slinks past Sheik and closer to Link, Link still tries to reach around him to get to Sheik anyway.

Fully extricated, Sheik abruptly drops his pants. Sidon jolts and looks away, still in disbelief that this crass man and Hylia’s avatar are the same person.

“It’s okay, Link,” Sheik tells him, voice gentle and even, albeit distracted as he steps into Link’s clothes. 

Link rests on Sidon’s chest, still reaching towards Sheik.

“You know him, Link. It’s Mipha’s brother.” Sheik says to him.

He seems to calm down some as soon as Mipha’s name is mentioned. 

He looks down at the way the clothes fit him once he had them on. They were a little awkward. They looked slutty on Link, but Sheik being bigger, they looked even sluttier on him.

“Fucking-- whatever,” Sheik mutters, resting the clothes he’d taken off on the countertop next to them. 

Sidon can’t help but let his mind wander what’s just happened while Link slowly wraps his arms around him, breathing shallow and quick.

“ _Hug him_ , stupid.” Sheik spits, and Sidon quickly does as he’s told. “You’re going to be doing a lot of it for the next week.”

“Right,” Sidon nods, stricken by just about every piece of information he’s received in the past five minutes.

“He’s not okay. He won’t be for a while, and he needs to stay here with someone he knows.”

Sidon’s prepared for it. He’s only heartbroken that he wasn’t there to stop all of this from happening.

He thought Link was through with going out and endangering himself. It hadn’t happened in so long. He’d made so much progress.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Sheik says to him, resting a hand over his bicep.

Sidon looks to the man, grim, but nods in reply.

“If you need to blame anybody, blame me. It’s always been my fault for not being ready for what happened.”

He knows Sheik speaks of more than just Link’s kidnapping. It’s his apology for Mipha, his lament for Urbosa, and his guilt for Daruk and Revali.

Sidon appreciates it, but he could never blame Sheik. He was as much a victim of this as Link was, he was just traumatised differently.

“I will never live it down as long as I exist, but I’m going to fix it, and you’re going to help me by being there for him.” Sheik says.

“He loves you, Sidon. Don’t be mad at him for tonight.”

Sidon wouldn’t dream of being angry at Link, but he knows that it’s exactly what Link will fear the most when he’s back in his right mind.

Sheik flees the laundry, footsteps disappearing into the house, and presumably out into the night.

It leaves Sidon with Link quivering and broken in his arms, tasked with figuring out how to not let Link fall apart after his horrifying encounter.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not add another chapter of fluff and comfort after this - I only have a paragraph written at this moment. We will see.
> 
> Also, in case his presentation is a little confusing, Sheik's existence is analogous to that of a trans man's. He just has the unique privilege of being able to magically give himself the body he feels most comfortable in.


End file.
